Foer's Clairvoyance

May 3, 2007

Graham has good reason to fear Murdoch, who first floated the idea of purchasing Dow Jones to Kann in 1997, at the height of the Telerate debacle. And earlier this summer, according to one eyewitness, he told top News Corp. execs that "there's no other property in the world I would love to acquire more." Apparently, he covets it so much that he says he would want to personally run the Journal. "He has begun to justify to himself how he can pay $60 a share for the company," says one source who has discussed the Journal with him. Sixty dollars happens to be the price point at which, according to last May's Fortune article, the Bancrofts would sell. Dow Jones shareholder Mark Boyar says, "Murdoch is the most obvious buyer."
There's no denying the Journal would fit snugly into his empire. They share the same politics. So much so that at the height of last year's election, Karen House big-footed editors in Washington and published a note retracting an article's description of Fox News Channel as "a network sympathetic to the Bush cause and popular with Republicans." (One reporter from the Washington bureau told me her boss, Gerry Seib, "didn't know about the correction until it was a done deal.") More important, the Journal also jibes with Murdoch's wish to launch a Fox business channel.